


dulces ante omnia

by aliferlia



Category: Havemercy Series - Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett
Genre: Hal and Royston refurbish Ravenclaw Tower, Language Kink, Multi, celestial freckles, domesticity porn, flagrant abuse of the laws of thematic conservation, have I mentioned language kink because that’s, heavy-handed sun symbolism, that’s in there, the whole thing is a metaphor for fanfiction actually, unashamed fluff, unsubtle star metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-16
Updated: 2013-09-16
Packaged: 2017-12-26 17:22:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/968514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliferlia/pseuds/aliferlia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The long-threatened starfic. Alternately: Hal and Royston refurbish what is absolutely not Ravenclaw Tower.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dulces ante omnia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [InRetrospect](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InRetrospect/gifts), [IWasHereMomentsAgo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IWasHereMomentsAgo/gifts).



> Title from Georgics 2.475 - 7: ‘Let Poetry take me as Her student - for struck by a tremendous love, I do Her bidding dutifully, and think Her sweet beyond all else - and let Her teach me one by one the stars and the pathways of heaven.’ Credit for this idea is due entirely to InRetrospect; written for IWasHereMomentsAgo.

In the darks of early spring I waited alone for morning.

The topmost room of the tower had been an observatory, once, and though still well-equipped, it was now sadly neglected. The wind had gotten in through the balcony where grey curtains hung like cobwebs, and together with several industrious generations of pigeons had worked all sorts of mischief. Slipped out from under an amber paperweight, the many phases of the moon lay scattered quite out of order across the room, and all the constellations had left the shelves and removed to new homes in corners and on the floor. Spattered liberally with black mildew, half the charts had faded so pale that they seemed to show not the sky but its afterimage. There must once have been a crystal orrery of sorts, now long since shattered, for I could identify strewn across the room planets by their colour: small lead-backed shards of Mercure, half a blue shell that had been Ouranos, a rough chunk of red-gold glass the size of my fist that still bore the old alchemical rune for Jupiter. They glittered quite aptly on the dark floor. I cut my feet more than once picking my way from the door to the window and left my blood behind me.

I never made any attempt to reorder the chaos of that place, although from time to time I might creep through it with great care, touching a relic, deciphering a line of scrawled co-ordinates, peering into a box of ancient nibs and long-dried inkpots. The bronze astrolabe, cloying cold under my hands and so heavy that I could barely lift it, remained titled on its side in the northwest corner: the telescope remained folded plain as an umbrella against the balcony wall. Still I loved that room: for its chaos, I think, not despite it. The round floor was of smooth ebony, tremendously black and flat, and although I could barely see the ceiling by the glow of my stubby old candle, the occasional glint of light that flickered through the cobwebs made me certain that it had once been painted bright with stars.

Stuffed full of old charts and mouse-nests alike, the bookshelves ringed me in very companionably, and there was even the shell of an a wicker chair that served me well enough for a perch. From there I could huddle beneath my blankets and watch the skyline for signs of light. I loved to wait alone with my chin on my knees for the first unfolding of dawn over the city, to catch the earliest stirrings of the wind from the sea. The tops of all the spires were touched rosy-bright, and the Bastion fairly glittered as the light widened: the smell of smoke from the bakers’ chimneys, when accompanied by the clatter of wagons making the long widdershins climb into Miranda, was to me the most comforting thing imaginable. I would forget the chattering of my teeth and prop my arms on the balustrade, delighting in the catch of grit and lichen beneath my skin as I leaned out into the wind and watched the morning pass away over the rooftops and through the world.

Royston found me there eventually, one cold day just after sunrise. He did not speak, although I did distinctly hear him try to muffle a curse as he met unexpectedly with some obstacle. It was so very early in the year that the old swallow’s nest mudded into the corner of the casement stood empty still: the long brittle brionies that hung from all the gutters had barely begun to flower. The grey curtains rose and fell with the wind. I remember I closed my eyes.

‘There are warmer places and friendlier company than rooftops when one cannot sleep,’ he remarked, far more precisely than I had expected. Either he had found his way to some coffee - a labyrinthine task fraught with stubbed toes and unexpected curtain cords that he could rarely be trusted to negotiate without my assistance - or he had been awake several hours already.

‘I don’t mind it up here,’ I said. ‘Did I wake you?’

‘You might have,’ he allowed, and then yawned. ‘Very probably, in fact. Results are almost in, and I’d go so far as to say that it’s a definite possibility.’

Stung by remorse, I opened my eyes and turned to look up at him anxiously. ‘I’m so sorry - I was trying to be as quiet as I could -’

Shaking his head, he gave me a small one-shouldered shrug: brushed a knuckle against my cheek to silence me. ‘I’ll make time to be cross about it later,’ he said. ‘I’ll pencil it in for five minutes at, say, two o’clock, while you’re still in class: _be cross with Hal_. That way I’ll be sure to forget all about it, since everyone knows I’d never dream of doing anything I plan to.’ His fingers lingered a moment in my hair, and then he had stepped out from the doorway: crossed the small balcony to prop his elbows on the balustrade and give a great yawn as he looked out across the city. ‘Are you having trouble sleeping?’

His hand had been warm against my windtouched skin, the calloused weight of it familiar and steady. It shook some of the chill from me, so that I could shift out from under the shelter of my blanket and lean forward to consider him in profile. The rising light caught his hair and wrote it bright, flooded all the lines and shadows of his face, so that had the collar of his shirt not stirred in the wind, I would have thought him cast in copper or in gold. The calm that came over his face then was one that even I rarely saw, reserved as it was for Thremedon alone. The noise of bells started up from a distant clock-tower, cloudy and somehow ancient, and poured out through the streets together with the light. I remember that birds rose up, circling round in a great cloud over the Basquiat, and sped away out of sight. Royston breathed out: closed his eyes a moment, lifted his face to the wind.

‘I keep waking up,’ I admitted, in a small voice, feeling very troublesome and very mundane. ‘I can’t sleep the night through. I don’t really mind it. It means I can watch the stars.’ I pulled ‘Or as many of them as you can see here, anyway. They’re so much brighter out in the country.’

A smile lifted the corner of his lips, though still he did not turn: he had not yet had his fill of gazing out at the city, but was taking it in the way I have seen other men drink long draughts of sweet wine. ‘Keeping company with Orion? He’s almost out of sight, this time of year. Or were you watching for the Dog? He’s just over there.’ He pointed south-east across the city to the sea, where it lay grey under the last scraps of golden mist.

‘I’ve never learned my constellations,’ I confessed, feeling more useless still. ‘That is, I know their stories! Everyone in the old tales seems to end up being turned into a star at some point. But I can’t find them in the sky, not really. I thought I might learn, when I found this room, but - well.’ I glanced over my shoulder at the disorder in the little room behind me.

‘It is a tad - well, creatively arranged, isn’t it?’ Royston agreed, chuckling softly.

‘It’s a good sight more organised than your study,’ I chided him.

He laughed aloud at that, and turned at last from the city: came to perch just next to me on the arm of the wickerwork chair, so that I could lean my head to his side with a great weary yawn, engage myself stealthy in breathing in the scent of his waistcoat without being noticed - for he was already impeccably dressed, hair combed and amber cufflinks neatly fastened, while I was still unshaven, and bundled up in three nightshirts and a heap of blankets besides. Spread out in gold and palest grey before us, gleaming like a fairytale, the city was almost too bright for me to bear. I wanted to curl up in Royston’s shadow and sleep until darkness came again.

‘Are you quite certain you’re alright?’ he asked me, rubbing slowly with his thumb at a spot at the base of my neck: I had a little cluster of freckles there for which he had always shown a particular fondness. ‘You aren’t having nightmares, are you?’

‘No, it’s not that,’ I said, immediately: for often, in the winter when the windowsills swelled fat with snow, I had had to wake him from a struggling nightmare and take great care not to be hurt in the process. I hated to think that he might one day have to do the same for me. ‘There’s no trouble, not really. I’ll try not to wake you if it happens again.’

But it did, several times within the space of the next two weeks. It came quite unexpectedly, that strange sudden jolt that pulled me up from dreaming and left me gasping in the dark, an ache in my chest and a heavy spinning dizziness in my head. It brought to me a great disquiet, so that I could not stand to stay caught within walls, and could not rest until I had come out into the wind and the empty dark. I passed ruefully through the chaos of the astronomy room, running my fingers over the casing of the telescope, which gave off such a cheerful golden glint in the dimness that I longed to unfold the poor thing and set it to its purpose. Without the proper training, I would only have broken it.

I left it behind, ignoring the prickle of my bare feet as I passed across glass and broken porcelain, and leaned out over the edge of the balcony. Even in the hour before dawn, some few lights still burned below, and just overhead the first sweet-smelling sprays of jasmine had begun to bloom, the blossoms glimmering pale all about. There were stars enough on earth to content me perfectly well, and yet I looked up. To the south, I knew the three stars that I understood to be part of Orion, although in Nevers we had always said that they were three deer, and the red star just behind them a wolf on the prowl; to the north, I knew Polaris, and remembered vaguely that it was part of the Grande Chariot, which was tangled up in a thousand other anonymous stars. I knew nothing else.

The door creaked behind me, and then there came a moment’s worth of quiet, which was quite spoiled when, for the second time, he kicked a table leg. I caught very clearly his muttered _Bastion_! and smiled. He had never been one for stealth. By the time he made it to the balcony, I had the blanket ready for sharing: he slipped inside it and settled his arms around my waist, put his cheek to my shoulder. He warmed me like the sun.

‘We really can’t keep meeting like this,’ he murmured through the dark. ‘Think of the rumours! People might say we’re in love.’

‘I thought they were all too busy saying that I was a gold-digger waiting to poison you and claim your fortune,’ I said, since I had, in fact, heard this repeated several times. It had distressed me no end when I was new to Thremedon, for I had been anxious not to bring shame to Royston, or to give him any cause to doubt me when he had been so badly betrayed so many times before: but Royston, petulant though he grew at any public speculation as to his own doings, had only laughed uproariously at the thought of my being ‘anything other than the noblest and gentlest soul in the whole of this wretched city’, and then promptly offered to apply his Talent to the task of discouraging the man who had spoken the rumour from repeating any more. ‘Recently I’ve been meaning to poison you with one of your own rings. Did you know that you’ve been having an affair with one of the ’Versity professors, and that I’m going to be murderous with jealousy when I find out?’

‘Murderous, hmm?’ he asked. ‘You must be terribly devoted to me, then.’

It felt strange to be talking here with the brimming silence of the city all around us and only the stars above, so public and so private at the same time, but I found that I quite liked it: it was like scrawling secrets out upon an empty page and then burning them. ‘Only to your gold,’ I reassured him, looking down at my hands on the balcony, pale as bone in the blue starlight. ‘I’m passionately in love with your gold.’

‘That explains why you couldn’t even stand to let me buy you a new winter coat, instead of that awful old brown sack of yours,’ he said, tartly. ‘You’re hoarding up my money so that after you’ve gotten me out of the way you can spend it all on wine and rentboys.’ Here he kissed my neck quite tenderly, as though apologising to it for my parsimonious ways. ‘Not even a new _scarf_ , Hal, and this was one of the heaviest winters Thremedon’s seen in a while. What would I do if you caught pneumonia? Going into mourning is such a tedious business.’

‘I’d only spend _some_ of it on wine,’ I protested, beginning to feel a good deal more grounded. ‘I’d - I’d gamble the rest of it away in six months - really, it’s like you don’t know me at all -’

But he had found something that interested him in the little patch of freckles at the base of my neck that he loved so well, and was engaged in examining it further. ‘Here,’ he said, angling me with careful hands so that I caught the best of the starlight, ‘just here, you’ve a little Leo. Look - he’s very small, but he’s there all the same.’

His fingers at my throat and his lips at my ear were together beginning to grow somewhat overwhelming. ‘Oh,’ I said, somewhat breathlessly as he worked the collar of my nightshirt open, ‘oh, that - don’t, that tickles -’

‘Constellations aren’t ticklish,’ he chided me. ‘Hold still. I want to see if you’re stars all the way down.’

‘Which one’s Leo?’ I asked with a sharp breath, still staring fixedly at the sky. A line of faintest gold had started up on the horizon, like a thin broken wire wrapped about the rim of the earth. ‘Show me - Royston! Which one is he?’

Folding one arm very firmly about my waist, and resting his hand scant centimetres above my thigh, he snaked the fingers of his other hand into mine and lifted my hand up to the sky. I let out a long breath and fell back into him. The stars seemed suddenly to be far less clear than they had a moment ago, but I focused on them as best I could. He moved our tangled fingers slowly eastwards, stopping at last to draw an oblong that did not seem to me to be anything like a lion.

‘Here’s Denebola, to start with,’ he murmured, kissing a point on my skin that made my face burn and my breath catch. ‘The tail of the lion. And then up, along his back, to Zosma and to Algieb.’ He spoke the names with a harsh and authoritative precision, like an enchanter summoning spirits out of the air to do his bidding. I let my head fall back onto his shoulder, dry lips parted. He kissed two corresponding points on my skin as he traced the stars with our hands: moved his other hand lower still to cup my hip.

‘That looks nothing like a lion,’ I managed to get out, then had to bite down hard at my lip to keep from gasping aloud. The stars were beginning to blur alarmingly: the edge of the sky was flushed with points of gold and red. If Royston had meant for this to be educational, his methodology had been poorly chosen. ‘You - you’re making the whole thing up.’

He nipped sharply at my throat by way of rebuke: he grasped my wrist hard, sliding his thumb into my palm. ‘I’m doing no such thing,’ he said, and kissed the skin that he had bitten, as though to soothe it. ‘Adhafera makes up the neck - there, do you see? - and then the head is those four. That’s Alshemali - and Minliar - and Alterif - and Algenub.’ Four kisses, in a small square, hot and deliberate at the base of my skull. The words themselves, powerful in the way of all old and unknown things, struck me deep as the touch of his lips, if not deeper. I loved his voice, and always had. ‘And then, just here, Aljaba, the throat.’ He parted my hair, nails raking hard at my skin, and blew softly, so that I shuddered: and he brought our entwined hands down and pressed my own cold fingers against myself.

‘And that - that very bright one?’ I asked, determined in spite of my hazing vision to have all of it, to hear spoken every secret he knew, to learn from him the names of darkness.

He took my chin in his hand and twisted my head round, very gently, so that he could breathe soft and hot against my lips. ‘The Heart of the Lion, Corleonis, Cabelased: Vasiliskos, the Boy King.’

All things considered, that was the beginning of it.

*

‘You want to tidy a room?’ I asked, blinking, so shocked that I didn’t think how it must sound until he gave a little _huff!_ of discontent and pulled the most petulant face I had ever seen. ‘No, no, that’s not - no, I didn’t mean it that way! You’re not always untidy, you’re _not_ -’

‘I’m perfectly capable of being orderly when I _want_ to be,’ he muttered, very put out, and began to hurry away at such a pace that even the hardened ’Versity pigeons were startled up into flight.

Their wingbeats echoed off stone all through the empty courtyard. It was a cold spring afternoon, and the sun had not yet remembered the habit of staying awake very long: although the tower bells had barely struck five, the light was already beginning to slant darkly gold between the pillared shadows of the collonade. I hurried after him, scarf flying out behind me, and caught at his arm: tugged on it anxiously, dug in my heels until he slowed his pace.

‘Of course you are,’ I said, even though this was a blatant untruth. ‘Of course you are, you only _choose_ chaos, it’s the mark of true ingenuity, you’re a perfect genius and a hero besides for offering to clean the astronomy room. When can we start?’

‘You’ve gotten worryingly good at appeasing me,’ Royston said. ‘How did I ever think you were at all innocent?’

‘It only works because you’re so forgiving,’ I told him, happy enough at the thought of having a room full of stars all to myself that I allowed myself to grow quite cheeky in celebration. ‘So forgiving, and so neat, and of course so _very_ handsome -’

He threw back his head and laughed aloud. ‘ _You_ are a cunning little monster,’ he said, and kissed my temple as we rounded the corner.

Adamo was waiting for us at the foot of the stairs, engaged in a tussle with his scarf. He had removed to the countryside several months back to oversee some sort of military enterprise, the specifics of which not even Royston professed to know for sure, although I was certain he knew more than he let on. Adamo’s rare visits to Thremedon were anticipated largely by bureaucracy, and sure enough, he was juggling a heavy sheaf of paper from arm to arm as he tried unsuccessfully to loop his scarf around his neck. At the sight of us, he pulled a face. ‘Oh, for Bastion’s sake, I’d forgotten what you two are like,’ he groaned. ‘Fuck this, I’m leaving.’

Royston gave him a little bow. ‘How lovely to see you, too, Owen,’ he said. ‘We’re very well, thank you - how is the Estate?’

‘Don’t start, you wretched bastard,’ Adamo said, and rubbed wearily at his cheek, which had the added effect of seeing him end up even more tangled in his scarf. I watched in fascination. ‘We were up at the crack of dawn to make it here on time, and it wasn’t an early night before that, either.’

‘Mm, yes, it does show, rather,’ Royston agreed gaily, eyeing his stubble with what appeared to be enormous enjoyment. ‘That charming lass of yours drink you under the table again?’

‘That I did, quite comprehensively,’ said a voice, and Laure came ambling down the stairs and into the light of the setting sun. I had known her only vaguely while she had been a student, but she had been drawn into Adamo’s secret project, whatever it was, and forgone graduation in favour of a military career. The change was suiting her well: she seemed very comfortable in jodhpurs and wore a heavy blue and gold shinel, so that with the added effect of her hair blazing like fire in the sunset, she cut a tremendously intimidating figure. ‘Evening, you two,’ she said, reaching out to shake both our hands in a brisk, business-like fashion. ‘You wouldn’t happen to be teasing Owen, would you, Margrave?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing, Corporal,’ Royston said, and stooped to kiss her hand. He had developed a sort of teasing rapport with her that I suspected was very similar to Owen’s grudging alliance with me. ‘As always, you look radiant.’

‘And as always, you are an irredeemable rogue,’ she said, which made Royston beam in appreciation, while Adamo sulked in his scarf. ‘Don’t look so pleased, flippancy is a terrible habit of yours and you really ought to have it seen to. Now, that’s enough of the pleasantries. Somebody find me a drink.’

We ended up huddled around a table in a small close-roofed cookshop at the seedier end of the Amazement, the sort of place that Royston and Adamo appreciated because it reminded them of their disreputable ’Versity days, and for which I had a great fondness due to the intricate knotwork in the walnut-wood tables, and the secret painting of the goldfish behind the fourth window casement on the right, and the three stone gargoyles that always looked as though they were asleep just beneath the second storey window, and a hundred other private curiosities that I had unearthed over the course of many tipsy evenings’ observation. Royston kept one hand on my knee throughout, and I took advantage of the limited seating space to cling as close to him as I could.

Our two visitors were scheduled for an early-morning meeting up at the Basquiat, it transpired, there to discuss some terribly important matter about which Laure managed to spend half an hour complaining in great and thorough detail without ever revealing what, precisely, it was. ‘And that’s _if_ Antoinette will even make time to see us,’ she concluded, and slammed her fourth flagon down on the table with an impressively steady hand, waved at the nervous-looking waiter for another round. At her side, Adamo nursed a single finger of brandy and pretended not to notice Royston’s gleeful smirk. ‘I love the woman, but she’s a wretched old battle-axe, really she is. No, wait, I probably shouldn’t even _think_ that in Thremedon. She has ways, she does. Ways and means.’ She gave me a rousing clap on the shoulder. ‘Come on, then! Tell me about anything other than the bloody Greylace Estate.’

I was warm and happy, and Royston seemed to be in a good mood, which always made me happy, and so I said the first thing that came to mind, which was, ‘Royston’s offered to clean the astronomy room with me.’

Adamo choked on his whiskey. ‘Roy’s offered to clean something?’ he demanded. ‘ _Willingly?_ Bastion’s sakes, kid, what _are_ you?’

‘Magic,’ Royston supplied, gazing deeply in my eyes, less because he was feeling particularly tender just then and more because he had, I suspected, rather missed reducing Adamo to a spluttering wreck of indignation.

That evening did Royston tremendous good, for despite their blustering, he and Adamo did not do well without each other. They were both of them so pleased to see each other, in fact, that by the time we parted, they were observed to wish each other a perfectly civil goodnight, and even to shake hands like gentlemen. (‘Did you hear Owen calling him a cantankerous old tosser?’ Laure asked me in a loud stage whisper. ‘Not even once!’ I whispered back, aghast. ‘Do you think we broke them?’ ‘Now kiss, you fools!’ she yelled at them, so that Adamo lobbed a drunken napkin in her direction while she ducked, cackling.)

Royston and I both had the next day off, and so we took a late and indulgent breakfast together, very different from our usual affairs involving burnt toast and hasty cups of tea taken standing up in scant minutes. Royston seized every opportunity to remark loudly how glad he was that at least _he_ did not have to be at a top secret meeting, that _he_ was well-shot of such things, that he could not _imagine_ how tedious it must be to have to discuss some trifling matter of defense at the crack of dawn - all of which I took to mean that he was, in fact, supremely jealous.

‘You _love_ top secret meetings,’ I scolded him as I got up to clear the table. ‘You love them almost as much as you love bookshelves that open up into secret passages, and writing desks with hidden compartments, and those silly rings you can put things into. You’ve a vice for the clandestine and you know it.’

‘Grievous insult to what is, in fact, a _very_ valuable collection of antique poison rings aside,’ he said, ‘I am actually very glad that I don’t have to fuss about with Basquiat-related espionage this morning, since it means that we’ll have time to spare for our own project.’

This seemed very promising indeed, and I perked up, especially since he had unbuttoned the collar of his shirt and was beginning to roll his sleeves up most appealingly. ‘And what project might that be?’ I asked, innocent as I knew how.

‘Not what you’re thinking,’ he said in amusement, which deflated me somewhat. ‘Hal, I did make you a promise yesterday, and I mean to keep it. We’re going to make that astronomy room of yours habitable again, or at least get tragically dusty while trying.’

I set the remains of my scrambled eggs down with a clatter and fairly tripped over my feet in my hurry to kiss him.

I know that it may have seemed silly to be excited about the idea of cleaning up an old forgotten room, but I had grown very attached to it during all the cold mornings I had spent there - and besides, Royston did look _very_ handsome in his oldest shirtsleeves and a pair of trousers that had been a gift from a margrave he particularly despised, gamely carrying a box of featherdusters upstairs, a dustcloth tucked into his back pocket. I made very certain to walk behind him, since the trousers were a little tight.

The hard work of dusting came first, and left us sore-necked and sneezing, but proved to be well worth it, for as I had suspected, the domed ceiling was richly decorated, and as we cleared the cobwebs away, painted stars began to shine out through the murk. The cornice was shod with bronze and marked into twelve neat delineations, each one guarded a small ecliptic sign beautifully worked in jade and shell: crab or girl or scorpion, lion or water-bearer. At the very zenith was a circular skylight, clearly meant to stand for the moon. The ceiling itself had been set inlaid with lapis and scored into careful segments with bands of bright gold, while the stars themselves were shown by cut-outs of nacreous shell. A comet tarnished by half hung low on the horizon, dripping with silver filigree: beneath it, a flush of clustered tiger’s-eyes showed the back of the westering sun, while to the south the rough inner skin of geodes stood glittering dark for the Cobalts. The seaward edge was ringed with a foamy lace of ivory.

‘Oh,’ I said, softly, ‘oh, _Royston_ -’

‘And it’s not just for decoration, either,’ he said, considering it with a critical eye. ‘It’s a functional star-map - look how neatly the angles of ascension are laid out, and the perfect positioning of Polaris. At least sixty years old, to judge by the tarnishing. It's a marvellous piece of work.’

‘You're a marvellous piece of work,’ I said, giddily, and tore my eyes from the miracles overhead to kissed him on the nose. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you for helping me! I knew it would be lovely, but I couldn’t have imagined this!’

‘This is what I get for taking up with youngsters,' he said with a sigh. He loved to give me beautiful things, and then to pretend that they had not meant anything at all. 'I have to suffer your boundless enthusiasm. I was warned, I suppose.’

‘You've never minded my boundless enthusiasm before,’ I reminded him, and stole another kiss, red in the face but emboldened by the stars.

‘You keep your wanton hands under control,’ he chided me. ‘Back to dusting.’

We unhooked the grey tattered curtains and hung in their place a pair of deep heavy drapes, inky-blue and infinitely soft, which Royston had hauled out from some dusty kist and professed to scorn - ‘A last gift from my great-great-aunt, I’m afraid,’ he said - but made very certain to leave them lying just so, then tried hard not to look pleased when I exclaimed in delight over the starry silver brocade at the hems. The many hundred books and star-charts, some few printed, most hand-written and hand-bound, one gloriously illuminated and likely very valuable, we sorted into piles and carried carefully downstairs into one of the store-rooms. Cataloguing them all would be a long, slow project, and one to which I looked forward immensely. I covered each book over in cloudy wax-paper, of the sort that we had on hand to protect our rarest books and oldest treasures, and stacked them away with care, touching their spines and their blue-marbled endpapers, moving dust from their strange stamped titles, reassuring them that I would return for them soon.

With that done, we could move to the remaining clutter. I hated to sweep away the glass that covered the smooth black floor, having come to think of the blood it drew as a necessary rite of passage, a sort of faerie toll paid to gain entry: but by daylight I could see very clearly that this was less a place of mystery and more the result of some ancient scholar’s eccentricities. They had left behind clear traces of themselves, for to each of the three heavy astrolabes had been appended a label that explained in faded brown ink their idiosyncrasies and upkeep, and most of the books were dated, and carried a record of their contents and provenance. We chipped away at what must have been several years’ worth of personal chaos, unearthing nocturlabes and sextants, orreries and torqueta, even a half-broken armillary hung lay spiderlike and dejected from an old hat-stand. Caskets there were also, overflowing with ink-pots and the spines of quill-pens, boxes of printer’s sand, many seabeans carved like snails and frogs, jade rings, a pestle carved in the shape of an elephant’s foot. We found everything from to small shining trees twisted of stones and wire to music notes cut hastily into the wainscoting next to the balcony. The sun swung around the tower and climbed to noon, and still we worked, sifting through treasures and organising them as best we could into boxes.

‘What _is_ all of this?’ I asked, on finding an ornate silken bag stitched with moons and emptying it to find that it contained only common glass marbles. ‘Who lived here before you did?’

‘I confess I haven’t the faintest idea,’ he said, plucking a fat silver marble from my thumbs and holding it up to the light so that it shone like a small sun in his palm. ‘It was boarded up when I first came to live here, and the magician I bought the tower from said that she had never used it. I’ve been trying to find documentation on the previous owners, but nothing’s turned up. Whoever it was must have been half-mad.’

The telescope gave us the most trouble of all, for it was a stiff and truculent old thing, its steel casings glued shut with rust and its spindly feet shod with moss. It glinted almost blindingly bright in noon sun. We managed to unfold it eventually, only to find the lenses so cracked and the mirror so spotted with mildew that it was virtually useless. Royston ended up gouging his thumb quite deeply on one of the rusty flanges, and so we decided to take a brief respite, cross-legged on the floor in the very centre of a shaft of warm sunlight that fell through the circular window overhead, so that we were spotlit against the dark. I pulled my handkerchief from my pocket and bound up the hurt thumb, then kissed it for good measure: blood seeped through in a black spot.

‘That’s very chivalrous of you,’ Royston proclaimed. ‘If I end up cursed to sleep for the next hundred years or so, you _will_ fight through the mess of brambles in the back garden and slay any lizards who get in your way, won’t you? I’ve an appointment tomorrow I can’t miss, so I’d appreciate being woken up.’

But the stars overhead had caught my eye, and the smooth glossy heat of the sunwarmed floor beneath my palms had set me daydreaming. ‘Was it Andromeda who was going to be eaten by a dragon?’ I asked, squinting up at the hazy ceiling. ‘Wasn’t she a constellation? A dragon or a water-snake, one of the two. And it was sharp rocks, in her case, rather than thorns.’

‘A sea monster, yes,’ Royston confirmed. Motes of dust flickered and swam all about us. ‘I wonder if I can find her somewhere in here, too,’ he added, idly, and made to unbutton my collar. ‘You’re covered in stars, you know. I shouldn’t wonder if you turned out to be a perfect map of the sky.’

My face flushed, and my throat bobbed under his touch. I turned to him, feeling my heart swell in my chest. His dark eyes were charged with pale flame: he could have been a god of light, steeped in radiance, a fixed point of brilliance at the heart of night. ‘I should warn you that if you’re going to insist on finding out, we won’t get any cleaning done for the rest of the day,’ I managed to say, but made no move to stop him.

‘Alas! You've rumbled my cunning plan,’ he said. ‘How dreadfully clever you are.’ His fingers fumbled on a button, and then he was pushing back the lapels of my collar and fitting his thumb to the hollow of my collarbone, where an embarrassing number of freckles persisted in what I had always thought was a rather childish fashion. He smiled, and bent to kiss them. ‘You see, there you are, quite covered in stars. Should I tell you that you’re my entire universe, or would that be a step too far?’

‘ _Much_ too far,’ I said, impatiently, since he seemed to have decided to be slow about it. ‘Let’s just agree that I’m stars, that I’m luminous, I’m heavenly, and so on and so on -’

‘How about if I said that, ah, that you’ve teeth as white as the Milky Way itself,’ he tried, with an expression of perfect solemnity, and then, when I nipped at his knuckle in frustration, added, ‘And very irresponsible teeth they are, too.’

‘If you’re not going to take this _seriously_ ,’ I sighed, and wriggled around so that I could get the upper hand.

He was still laughing when I managed to wrestle him back onto the floor, knocking over the neat pyramid of featherdusters as I did so. ‘Now, Hal, this is a serious matter, you’re _completely_ out of control, you must teach your wayward teeth some accountability - ah! Watch it, I think I heard something else fall -’

‘It was only Owen’s face, don’t worry,’ Laure said cheerfully, so that we both of us jerked in surprise: I sprang up off the floor, red-faced and frantic, fumbling at my collar. Wholly unabashed, she waved away my stammering apologies and said, ‘We can come back later, you know.’

‘I knew I shouldn’t have given him a key,’ Royston muttered, picking himself up and dusting his shirt down out of habit.

‘I knew I shouldn’t have accepted it,’ Adamo said, peering cautiously around the doorframe, then heaving a great sigh of relief. ‘At least you’ve got your clothes on this time. Look, we can go, we just -’

‘Nonsense,’ Royston said, to my great disappointment: while I understood _logically_ that etiquette must trump personal gratification, I had yet to be disabused of the notion that such logic was awfully boring. ‘As you can see, we’ve made great strides in rescuing this place from the attentions of mice and spiders, and now you’re going to come in and say encouraging things about our hard work. _Sincere_ things, mind you.’

‘Well, actually, we brought lunch with the stairs,’ Laure said, ‘except it’s going to take forever to get up the stairs at this rate - come _on_ , Toverre, it’s all perfectly respectable! No questionable fluids or anything!’

‘Is anyone naked?’ a faint and sharply panicked voice called. ‘Please tell me no one’s naked!’

We ended up having a picnic of sorts on the floor, with Laure pressing me for more gossip about the ’Versity, and the boy Toverre shyly chiming in with details that I had forgotten. I had long since singled him out as a good and clever student, and took the opportunity whenever we happened to meet at the ’Versity to try and befriend him, a little, although as we were both quiet people it had proven a delicate friendship so far: he blushed whenever he spoke to me, which only produced in me a great sympathy. Laure he seemed to idolise like an avenging deity, although with whom he could be snippish as a sibling, and I liked to watch them talk.

It was a pleasant afternoon, in all, very simple, but very comforting. This small lonely room had not had visitors in a very long while, and I was glad at the thought that it had found friends again, even if only for a little time. Laure approved immensely of the telescope, and managed to set it up properly, then recommended the name of a country glassworker who could provide new lenses at little cost: Toverre, handkerchief cautiously at the ready, examined the bag of marbles with the very tips of his gloved fingers, then said, ‘It’s quite - well, it’s nice, isn’t it? Not dusty at all. And I do like stars.’

Royston and Adamo retired to the balcony after a time to look out at their city, leaving the three of us to clamber about over bookshelves and fall headfirst into a pile of old cardboard boxes while laughing uproariously (Laure), end up swallowing a spider in a dashing rescue attempt from said boxes (myself), and cautiously befriend a jade sculpture of a tiger (Toverre).

‘Heading back soon?’ I heard Royston ask, quietly, as I gave Laure’s hand a great heave and managed to haul her back onto the safety of an old chest.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ Adamo told him. ‘Don’t look so tragic about it, old man. You’d hate it out there and you know it.’

‘There’s _money_ down there!’ Laure announced, triumphantly, pointing to the boxes, and held up a fistful of ancient copper coins. ‘Who wants to bet there’s buried treasure? Toverre, leave that silly thing alone and get over here! We can be pirates!’

‘Of course I would,’ Royston agreed. ‘When you get to be my age, however, you deal badly with change, particularly when half your friends see fit to go scurrying off on new adventures without you.’ Toverre gave a sharp squeak as he brushed some hidden mechanism on his tiger, causing it to bite down hard on his finger, and Royston looked over his shoulder: saw me grappling for balance while Laure waved a spare plank about as an impromptu sword, smiled a little. ‘Pay me no mind, Owen,’ he added, so softly that I almost couldn’t catch it. ‘It’s only that I hate winter.’

‘Maybe there’ll be _bones_!’ Laure was crowing, and flung her arm around my neck in jubilation as I clung desperately to a nearby hat-stand. ‘What if someone _died_ in here - oh, buck up, Toverre!’

‘You sorry-arsed lunatic,’ Adamo said, and put a hand very briefly on Royston’s shoulder. ‘You got your boy, don’t you? ’Sides, it’ll be warm again soon enough.’

‘But what if there are _ghosts_?’ Toverre wailed, still wrestling with his jade tiger. ‘Caius said if you disturb ghosts they’ll haunt you forever! That means _forever_ , Laure! What if you die and you end up as a ghost, but then you still have a ghost haunting you? What if they’re rude to you? Laure! Listen to me! Don’t touch anything! Please don’t get cursed!’

I started laughing so hard that I choked on a cobweb. Royston glanced back at me again. He did not answer Adamo: but he did smile.

*

It became a haven of sorts, where I could sit and work as late as I pleased, or where I could watch the sunrise in comfort whenever I happened to wake early. I had not had my own study in the tower, although Royston had threatened all sorts of elaborate renovations when I graduated and began to work on longer research projects, saying that it was criminal to expect the brightest young mind in Thremedon to flourish while cooped up in some cubbyhole of an office at the ’Versity, or sandwiched between old shelves in the library. Furiously embarrassed, not to mention cross with anxiety at the thought of so much expense, I forbade him to undertake any such projects. However, equipped with an inexpensive table of white birchwood, several cushions and thick blankets, and a few new bookshelves that would not give way under the weight of my dictionaries, the astronomy room ended up being perfect for my purposes.

Although I was more or less perfectly content, it had not been an easy winter for Royston. We had been four years and more at peace by then, and there had been a good deal less intrigue and considerably more transparency under Anastasia’s rule, who, lacking her husband’s paranoia, was less inclined to suspect war at every turn and go rushing in to prevent it. Recently, however, there had been the usual trouble with Arlemagne, and for a few very trying weeks Royston’s had been among the names of delegates selected to participate in a series of negotiations. Antoinette, now installed as Anastasia’s chief advisor, had eventually had to remind the Esarina that, with Erik newly installed on the throne, Royston’s presence might not be too conducive to the creation of a tactful diplomatic atmosphere.

Still, those short weeks at the heart of winter had seen the resurgence of all the old gossip. ‘It’s perfectly maddening,’ he had complained, ‘to be well-shot of all one’s old troubles, to be _divinely_ happy and assured of oneself, and then to hear people peddling the same old dreary rumours as ever, as though there weren’t a thousand and one more exciting things to talk about. This city never forgets anything, not really.’

It was a seasonal melancholy, bitter but temporary. I knew his fits of unhappiness, and had never tried anything so pointless as to remedy them, only made sure to wait at his side until they passed. I made sure that the fires were kept blazing all throughout the tower: I bought him five new and very stylish pairs of gloves, and even tried to knit him a scarf, once (the mangled result of which did make him smile, even if he only wore it around the house). His habits I had spent years studying as carefully as I now studied the stars, so that I could come to predict when he needed company and when he needed to be left to himself, when he wanted conversation and when he needed silence. I waited very patiently, and assured him as often as he needed to hear it that I would never leave his side.

As the weather warmed, however, and he began to come back to himself, he threw himself with remarkable vigour into the project of providing me with the sidereal education that I so lacked. ‘It’s the foundation of modern science,’ he insisted, growing quite excited about it, ‘it’s the foundation of modern _time-keeping_ , Hal, it’s fascinating from an etymological point of view, it’s _staggering_ how much the ancients managed to learn with only dull-lensed telescopes and almost nothing in the way of magic, it informs in large part historical background information that is crucial for your literary studies, _and_ there’s nothing so impressive as being able to show everyone at a party up by casually naming half the stars in the sky.’

‘I think your definition of impressive may differ somewhat to mine,’ I said, impishly, and then ducked for cover as he threw a cushion at me.

He made a grand project of it, as he had made a grand project of most of my education: he loved to teach me new things, loved to give me strange new words and oddments of history, and I loved to learn from him. He told me secrets about the lives of the men and women who had mapped the stars, explained quarrels between rival astronomers, recounted the many furious struggles to rename the sky after the rise and fall of each new dynasty through the ages. As spring passed, we suddenly started to uncover astronomical paraphernalia lurking nearly everywhere, in the way that a man newly introduced to a certain word will suddenly begin to hear it crop up in half-a-dozen unrelated conversations. Half-forgotten in the soapstone box where he kept his many poison rings, Royston found a thick triple-banded thing of gold that could fold out into a spindly armillary, miraculous in its intricacy and perfect in every respect. He insisted on my keeping it, saying that it would be useful to my studies. I protested, blushing madly and secretly thrilled, until he slid it onto my finger and kissed it, as though to seal it there. I wore it always after that.

‘Do you have a favourite constellation yet?’ he asked me, often, but I was indecisive, and volunteered a new set of stars each time. I had tremendous sympathy for Cassiopeia, although this was due less to the proud queen’s vanity in the old fairy story, and more to the constellation’s having once shared a name with a dragon long dead. I had never known her, but I liked to remember the dragons when I could, by way of apology for their lack of statues. I liked Andromeda even more, though of her stars I had not yet managed to learn more than Alpherat and Mirach: and I loved Pegasus, and both the Bears, and Eridanus, which to me had the most beautiful name of all.

‘Which is your favourite?’ I countered once, adding slyly, ‘Is it Leo?’

We were both busily occupied at the time, he writing up a long and tedious report on some spat between an ambassador and an unwary wildgrave the week before, I finishing a translation of a treatise on ancient rhetoric: but we had come up to the astronomy room to be together, as we did, sometimes, when our work stretched long into the evenings. Our notes were spread out across the round silver table, so that grammar and etiquette overlapped, and a warm evening breeze sweet with the last of the jasmine crept in through the window and flipped curiously through the pages of discarded books. His tapping fingers stilled when I spoke, and he pursed his lips; I thought for a long moment that he would not answer.

‘He isn’t here yet,’ he said, finally. ‘He’s a summertime guest. I’ll show him to you in a month or so: Antinoüs, hidden inside the Eagle, just below Altair. He’s been forgotten, for the most part. He was popular enough in the Old Ramanthe, but Volstov disapproved, and so you’ll find that he’s vanished from the newer charts.’

‘Why would Volstov disapprove?’ I asked. ‘Antinoüs - don’t I know that name? I’ve seen it in poetry.’

‘You would have, yes,’ he said. ‘Hadrien ruled the Old Empire, thousands of years ago, and ruled it well - or better, at least, than many who had come before him. He loved a boy, a country boy, whom he took into his court and treated as a favourite: but then Antinoüs drowned, quite suddenly, in a stream near their summer villa.’

‘Oh,’ I said, remembering a marsh, and a storm, and a terrible evening spent huddled in the branches of a tree. Hadrien I knew, as I knew all my emperors, learned by rote as a child: he had been a bearded man, elegant and educated, both a lover of poetry and a respected military commander. Of Antinoüs I knew nothing. I put down my pen, and, as I so often did, asked, ‘What happened next?’

Here he looked up at me, and pulled a strange, wry face. ‘Hadrien made him into a god,’ he admitted, almost apologetically. I understood, a little, and it made my heart ache in my chest. ‘A boy king, of sorts, really, a holy child. He named a city after him, and instituted rites in his honour, had hundreds of statues worked in his image, even put him into the stars. The world never recovered - hundreds and hundreds of years later, people were still making offerings at his shrines, still using his name in songs as a synonym for valour and devotion. I’ve seen statues of him - some still remain, even here, locked up in private collections, or hidden away in vaults.’

‘What are they like?’

He gave me that wry smile again, then returned his attention to his work. ‘He was very beautiful,’ he said, and that was all.

Sometimes, while engaged in study, we would invent new constellations, throwing them out idly to trick each other, making them more and more ridiculous and unlikely, so that eventually we set up a wager as to which of us could convince the other of more invented names. As I broadened my studies, I began to take great pleasure in bluffing, so that when he countered my casual, ‘I haven’t finished learning all the ascensions of the Reindeer, though,’ with a great snort of laughter, saying, ‘Oh, come now, Hal, you can be subtler than that, you know,’ I was able to drag him out of his armchair and up to the astronomy room to showed him, proudly, the constellation Tarandus, neatly recorded in a very recent star-map.

He did not speak to me for the rest of the day, I remember, although afterwards he confessed himself completely sold, and offered to teach me poker, ‘to provide a more lucrative outlet for your talent for wickedness and deceit.’

‘I thought I was the noblest soul in Thremedon,’ I countered, going a little red as I said it, but driven by the softness about his eyes to match his teasing.

‘Lies,’ he said, ‘all lies, you’re a purveyor of falsehoods and the prince of mendacity. Now hurry up and find your coat or we’ll be late for lunch, and then you’ll have to add tardiness to your list of sins.’

Often I could not keep up with the pace of his bright imaginings, and was left to listen breathless and giddy as he spoke on and on, building names and clans and love affairs, drafting constellations into great battles and sending them on sea voyages to the farthest reaches of night. He dredged up a deadly rivalry between Draco and Hydra, the two great watersnakes of the air, and told me of their long battles and ancient enmity, while poor little Serpens tried his best to be like his two heroes but always had to slither along behind. _Unukalhai_ , he said, pointing to the very bright star at the centre: _Corserpentis_ , the Snakeheart. Those names alone would have set me shivering with wonder even had I read them in some old ledger on a dusty shelf, but spoken aloud in his clear strong voice they left me breathless with delight. I had always loved to learn from him, whether it was history or poetry, geography or politics: he had a talent for transferring some spark of glory into even the smallest scrap of information. I thrived on it. He had always been a storyteller at heart, however well he tried to hide it.

‘Ah, see, now there we have our dear friend the lady Antoinette,’ he might say, pointing to a patch of stars at random, ‘looking as regal as ever, I might add - there, that little bright cluster is her velikaia’s badge. Can’t you see how she’s got her boot up? I think she’s trying to step on something.’

‘The Esar’s nose,’ I suggested at random, clinging closer to him and cuddling my chin on his shoulder, feigning a yawn so that I could take a deep breath. He smelled of fresh-pressed linen and the fireplace, and of something warm and comforting that I could never quite name. ‘Look, see, there he is. He’s fallen over for some reason, and that pointy little triangle of stars is his nose.’

‘Yes, he’s crawling about to look under the furniture for his marbles,’ Royston agreed, ‘which I think we can all agree he lost some time ago.’

I was still yearningly in love with his boundless scope for invention, with his flair and his cunning, his passion for invisible things. For all that he cultivated his wit into dry cynicism and professed to love poetry only with the offhand obligation of a critic, I knew better: he always spoke most sharply of the things that he loved best. To his mind, all boy kings must die, at least in innocence. Although I hated it when his thoughts tended toward to the maudlin, I understood also that he had loved so many things so very much, and had been so badly punished for that love, that he had had good cause to learn flippancy. I cherished his rarer, brighter moments. He loved to perform, to awe, to impress, and if he could manage it with words, so much the better. I had known it when he had spun stories of dragons and explosions and frozen mountains to entertain a roomful of wide-eyed children: I knew it now as he rewrote the stars for my sake. I wanted to hold his words in my hands and turn them over like shells or stones or smooth seaglass, learning by heart every line and fleck and flaw, marvelling at the weight of them: I wanted to hold everything he said up to the light as though it were cut of ivory or amber. I could have listened to him tell me stories forever.

*

It was an unusually warm evening, particularly since it was not yet properly summer by anyone’s estimation. Even with the balcony windows flung wide, there was little in the way of a breeze to bring respite, for the evening wind had long since slipped out to sea and left in its place a hot heavy stillness that smelled equally of smoke and the last of the season’s blossoming jasmine. Framed by flowers, the lights of the Thremedon stood sharp and hard in the blue dusk, as though all the stars had come down out of the sky to take an evening’s entertainment on the Amazement. From time to time I heard hard wingbeats pass overhead as geese sped away inland: a red moon rose over the black glassy sea. I rolled my sleeves up and unbuttoned my collar: shucked my shirt off altogether as the candle burned down and the air showed no sign of cooling.

Royston had been delayed at the Basquiat yet again by some crisis or another, and although he had sent word that I was not to wait up for him, since he worried about my getting enough sleep, I was quite happy to work late in the astronomy room. While cataloguing the charts that had been removed to the store-room, I had happened upon a children’s handbook of star-tales that would have been unexceptional but extensively notated by an unknown hand in Old Ramanthine with what appeared to be old folkloric alternatives to the commonly accepted star-myths. Having recognised references to several stories that I had heard as a boy, I grew immensely excited, and went immediately to the astronomy room to study it further, feeling that stars ought to be studied in the presence of stars. I copied out each notation first into legible longhand, in case I wanted to discuss them with anyone at the ’Versity, then into the private shorthand that Royston and I used for personal notes: then, having liberated a much-expurgated and highly illicit collection of Ramanthine fairytales from the locked cabinet in Royston’s study, I began the long work of cross-comparison.

The room still seemed rather empty without the clutter that I had come to know, but it was certainly a good deal more comfortable, and I loved to be able to look up at the star-dome overhead and feel the moonlight on my skin, to walk easily across the floor to confer with the sky itself whenever I needed to check the position of a constellation without suffering cut feet and bruises shins for my trouble. Besides, I could easily call back whatever chaos I needed to keep me company: perhaps my only real gift is my unfortunate propensity to daydream, and even in earliest childhood to transform a dull bare room into a battleground or a faerie cave, an ogre’s lair or an antique castle. Alone in that still warm room, a hundred tales built themselves up out of the pages and moved about me, so that as I worked by candle-light I had for company all the half-forgotten star-stories of the countryside, many of which had been whispered to me by superstitious nurse-maids or garbled by old playground rhymes: the man who swallowed the sun and brought it back to life each day by lifting his arms so that it could shine out from his breast, the enchanter who had for eyes the two stars Sirius and Murzim in his feet, the wise farmer who carried Achenar in his shining plough-blade and taught the world when to sow crops.

The candle burned out completely, and even though by my estimation it was very nearly midnight, Royston was not yet home. Still the air was oppressively warm, so that even if I had had light left to me, I would have been too muzzy-headed to continue studying. Pulling one of the soft white blankets from the armchair on the balcony, I spread it out on the floor, just beneath the column of white moonlight that spilled in through the high round window: and there I contented myself to gaze up at the stone-studded sky-dome, idly tracing the shape of each constellation and mouthing star-names to myself again and again, the better to pass the time until I heard Royston come home.

I don’t remember falling asleep, but I do remember being woken, quite suddenly, by a touch like a feather to the back of my neck. Blinking, I found myself sprawled amid blankets on my stomach, my head resting carefully on a cushion I most certainly did not remember having selected for myself. I recognised Royston’s gentle fussiness, and made to roll over, already half-expecting yet another lecture about falling asleep in strange places and risking everything from pneumonia to unexpected kidnap by persons of undisclosed identity: but was stopped, gently but firmly, but the press of a palm to my shoulder.

With the lightest of touches, something cool and damp moved along the nape of my neck: paused delicately just at the top of my spine, travelled on in strange stops and starts that made no sense. A line trickled slow down the side of my throat: biting my lip at the touch, I put my hand up to catch it. It was ink, freshly mixed by the scent of it, rich and shining against my spring-pale skin: I rubbed my fingertips together until shadow pooled in my palm. Something just beside my shoulder caught my eye, and I squinted down through the hazy moonlight. Three or four calligraphy brushes of the sort highly prized in the Ke-Han lay discarded amid the folds of the sheet. They had left a dark stuttering track across the white: their head still swelled thick with ink. The smell of it, cloudy and sweet, hung all about.

Even as I moved, I could feel the prickling cool of it drying all down my back: it must have wrapped me round entirely, branching out over my hips and my spine, coiling about my shoulder-blades, dripping all down my flanks. Despite the heat of the night, the hairs on my arms began to prickle. Looking down, I saw with a start that here, too, I had been annotated: thin, careful lines, marked with infinite precision, linked all the many childish freckles on my arms into chains. The shapes were familiar, although with the remorseless sweep and glide of the brush clouded my thought so badly that it took me a minute and more to place them. I had been made stars: he had written the bones of a hundred different constellation in ink upon my skin, so that I was become a star-map in reverse, all pockets of shadow and bright seaming.

I tried to sit up, but he moved over me, very gently, and pressed his palm to my shoulder once again, as though asking permission. I understood. I wanted nothing more than to kiss him without stopping, but he wanted to finish this. Chest aching, I clutched at the blankets and closed my eyes. The cold trickling trail continued, unhurried and unrelenting, until I was half-maddened with frustration and breathless besides, unable to think for want. He put his fingers into my hair and bent my head down, drew the brush along the base of my spine with calculated flick that saw me swallow, dipped it cunningly around the edge of my hip so that ink dripped down along my skin and stained the sheets. I clenched my fists and whined.

‘There,’ Royston said, after what seemed an interminably long time, and sat back. ‘You are stars, after all. I always knew you were. I’m quite gratified to be proven right.’

The sound of his voice alone nearly undid me, and as he finished speaking, he leaned down to press his forehead to my hair, blew softly on the drying ink at the nape of my neck. I shuddered. ‘You have - a pathological need - to be right about everything,’ I told him, trying and failing to keep my voice steady. ‘Was this necessary?’

‘Quite,’ he said against my ear, and put my fingers around my throat, kissed the line of my jaw,  ‘I’ve named you now. I’ve written you down and made you as close to eternal as you can possibly get. How clever of me to think of it.’

‘You can’t put me into the sky, Royston,’ I said, half laughing, half sad. ‘I’m not an Antinoüs, you know: I don’t need to be stars. Of all the many mad things you’ve done -’

‘This is by far the most romantic,’ he decided, still speaking and kissed my jaw again, leaned low so that I could feel the length of his chest pressed close against my back. I groaned. ‘Besides, this way it’s much easier to learn the constellations, don’t you think?’ One hand moved down my spine, trailing carefully over the ink. ‘You’ve a perfect Eridanus all the way along your back - did you know that? Here - Achenar, the Source of the River - then Acamar, his twin - here’s Themim - then Angetenar, the Bend in the River, just above your hip - then Rana, then Zaurak, and Cursa.’ He stopped, palm flat against the base of my spine, and laughed as he saw my fingers knot in the sheets. A thumb touched the dimples there, first the left, and then the right. ‘You’ve even got a Rigel, just here, and Aldebaran here. Quite miraculous.’

His voice was the most beloved thing in all the world: his words burned me half as deep at least as his touch, shining bright in the dark. My heart was burning in my chest like the sun, and I could not bear it. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘ _please_ ,’ and turned, writhing underneath him to surge up and into his arms. He had forgone his own shirt, very wisely, but even before I had done much more than get my arms clumsily around his waste, thoughtless as I was in my eagerness,  he stopped me, lips an inch from mine, by pressing his long beautiful hands to my throat. I stared down at him, dry-lipped, shoulders heaving, and nearly collapsed with desire.

In the filmy moonlight he was sharp-cut and pale as marble, his eyes dark and terribly regal, the lines of his face austere and blindingly bright. It was, I thought for perhaps the hundredth time, like coming face-to-face with an old and terrible god, as though a stone in a museum had suddenly thought to turn its burning eyes on me and bend down kiss my lips. He laughed at me, just loud enough for his breath to brush my dry lips, and cradled my head heavy in his hand as he reached for something at his side: set the fat dripping head of the brush to the hollow at the base of my throat, gave it a push.

A veiny spill of ink slid cold down my chest, and I shivered violently at the touch of it. I fell back with my lips parted, as though to catch the stars as they fell from his mouth: offered myself up to his hands. He slid his palm up across my chest to cover my throat, smearing the ink quite awfully. In desperation, I put my hands wonderingly to his face and made to kiss him: but was dismayed to see that where my hands passed, they I trailed dark marks behind them. I snatched them back, remembering that they were still covered in ink. It was like me, I thought, ruefully, to be clumsy where he had been so deliberate, impetuous and unschooled where he had been precise: but he drew me down by the wrists all the same and bit down hard on my throat.

‘Royston,’ I gasped, more because I loved to say his name than for any other reason, ‘ _Royston_ , I think you’re doing this on purpose -’

‘Of course I am,’ he said, cheerfully, against my skin. ‘Aren’t you enjoying the challenge?’

 

That was the very last of it. I fairly leapt for him, knocking the brush from his hand in my effort to kiss him. His mouth was burning hot under mine. He laughed, but I toppled him backwards undeterred, thumbed dark pools all along his spine as he fell back into the sheets. Only then would he relent to kiss me in earnest, and I set to work in relief, kissing him a thousand times, once for every name of every star he had loved enough to speak against my skin, and pressing myself against him until he was stained with ink as much as I was, so that we were livid and bright together as the night sky. His skin was hotter than the summer air, and I pressed again him half deliriously, kissing him hotter still. I could wake a thousand times in the dark of the night to find him lying next to me and never grow disillusioned of him, and I needed him to understand that: he did not need to write me eternal.

The fingerprints I left behind would be indistinguishable from the many other marks of love come morning: I bit sharply into his shoulder and his wrists until he fell silent, which was always his way, and folded his arms around my neck, cradling my head to his chest as I worked. The sheets were a terrible mess at that point, as covered in ink as we were, but the moon shone bright as ever overhead, and a thin cool breeze of early morning had started in off the sea: and we had always been that way, he and I, tangled up in the ink of a thousand tales and not caring particularly much about the chaos we left around us. We could empty a room of all its clutter and still end up scattering stories all across the floor, simply by virtue of our being quite hopeless about each other: we traded thousand-year-old words like gifts and wrote love letters in complex code on each other’s skin. I remember how he traced three freckles at my shoulder into a triangle, mouthed the names of the stars I knew to build Aquila: I remember how he put my fingers to his lips and kissed them each in turn. I understood it all. I knew him like a favourite book: I knew him like the sky.

*

‘I never know,’ I told him once, sleepily, as we drowsed together in the old wicker armchair, books scattered across our lap, ‘whether I want to lock everything you say to me inside a beautiful box and never show anyone because it’s too perfect, or whether I want to write it all out into a book and have it read out loud to the world, so that everyone can know.’

‘Most of it would be terribly boring, I’m sure,’ he said, eyes creased up and teasing in the red light of dawn. ‘But you can _preserve please pass the eggs_ and _have you seen my other shoe?_ for posterity if you like.’

‘You’re doing it again,’ I accused him, half-asleep, ‘you’re pretending as though it doesn’t matter. You always do that about important things.’

He gave a small scoff. ‘Oh, but eggs matter very much,’ he said. ‘I would never deny the importance of breakfast-table smalltalk.’

Though by then very sleepy indeed, I remember that I grinned in triumph. ‘You great silly,’ I murmured, warm and delighted, and closed my eyes. ‘That means you like me best of all.’


End file.
